Sprint CEO Hesse says that buying T-Mobile will help consumers

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse was interviewed on Bloomberg TV Tuesday, and was asked about Sprint's long-rumored deal to purchase T-Mobile. With U.S. regulators dead set against the transaction, you would think that Sprint and SoftBank would take their marbles (and by marbles, we mean cash) and go home. Instead, led by Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son, discussions with the banks continue. Sources knowledgeable with Sprint and SoftBank's plans, say that a bid for T-Mobile will be coming in June or July.

Hesse told Bloomberg that the current price wars can't last forever. And he also said that a stronger number three carrier (a combined Sprint and T-Mobile) would force Verizon and AT&T to be more aggressive, which would benefit everyone. Hesse adds that a weaker number three, won't put the kind of pressure on the nation's top two carriers to do the things that would be required to help consumers.

"T-Mobile and Sprint have to invest more per customer in their network. Think of a nationwide network, it largely affects costs. It is like a jumbo jet. AT&T and Verizon, because of their size, can put more customers on that, and divide it among more customers and can spend more money on advertising"-Dan Hesse, CEO, Sprint

The most recent rumors suggest that a combined Sprint-T-Mobile would be run by the latter's outspoken CEO John Legere. And that suits Dan Hesse just fine. "I am 60 years old," he says . "I have a lot of things I still want to do in life."

Seriously though. Help your own god dam* customers first Hesse. I left after 11 years because your LTE network build out went so dam* slow! Not to mention Sprint Customer Service sucked. T-Mobile is 50x better....

Because when your company has some serious problems, instead of fixing the problems, go shopping! And if that fails, go shopping again!

Pretty much everyone except for Sprint/Softbank needs to go all out to prevent this buyout. It will wipe out T-Mobile's stock value and destroy T-Mobile right as they are finally getting their ducks in a row. Which means all sorts of pension funds and the normal people whose money is in those funds will be harmed by this move by Sprint/Softbank. Not to mention all the Sprint/T-Mobile customers will be screwed for life paying for this dumb merger. There really is no better way to kill T-Mobile than to let Sprint buy it.

He is saying what he needs to say so the merger can get approved. There is no mobile carrier, T-Mobile included, that gives a rat's ass about consumers.

Some telecoms are more greedy than others, but having a market in the US dominated by a duopoly is a recipe for telecommunications disaster. Having it dominated by three companies is still a disaster, just with three cooks instead of two. If the government does anything, it should dust off the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and bust up ATT and VZW.

Exactly, everyone knows the entire wireless landscape in the us is messed up with powerful the powerful duopoly. But for some reason the talk to fixing that is more consolidation instead of breaking up AT&T and VZW to ensure that there is more competition that will lead to better services and lower prices. I'm positive they could both be split into 2 companies each and it could be done in a way that didn't put the new companies at a disadvantage.

The idea that triopoly is better than a duopoly or a quartetopoly is ludicrous. Rather, we need a multitude of carriers to have an actually competitive market that benefits consumers first and investors second.

So let me get this right. Hesse wants to combine the two companies so he can spend more money on ADVERTISING? HOW the F@CK is ADVERTISING going to help your customers who get spotty signal and slow service?

If you had invested in your D@MN network and had decent service you wouldn't need advertising.

There are basically four types of profit common in the telecoms. Not all apply to every telecom, i.e. T-Mobile is doing away with many or most overages.

1) Sell the customer one thing, then give the customer something less. This is where advertising helps you get more dupes in the door and locked into two year plans. Sprint sells their crap reception as some sort of novel superior technology when it is just the opposite, a low quality patchwork quilt of bandwidth bandaids.

2) Charge every customer full price for "unlimited text and voice" which very few people will ever use to any large extent.

3) Charge people insane prices for small amounts of data and then hit them with rapacious overage charges.

4) Charge people for a subsidized phone even after they've finished paying for the subsidized phone.

Most of these profits are predicated on having continued monopoly power. With real competition, the US would not have the worst value for your dollar telecom service like it has today.

"Put more customers on [the network], and divide it among more customers and can spend more money on advertising."

This is the quintessential Sprint: saturate the network and then lie about the quality of the service until they're blue in the face. This is a business plan with customer churn built in: they get unsatisfied at the service they get for their money and the company tries to yell over the word of mouth with ubiquitous marketing to make up for the customer losses.

And, given that Hesse is close to Softbank, I take that this is the plan for the result of the merger: a larger, still incompetent Sprint that will not be competitive at all and which will pillage its customers.

No. I mean consistent investing to have a high performing network every year. Adding towers to areas that have outgrown the coverage. Upgrading the network backhaul so towers with new equipment don't operate for months at degraded performance.

Yes, there was a time when Sprint's data network was slow, same thing happened to AT&T when they picked up the iPhone. I remember not being able to complete a call on AT&T and it was because the carriers were not ready for the massive consumption of data. Today, although all carriers have issues with data capacity, most of their networks perform fine. People just like to bash Sprint like they used to bash AT&T a few years ago when their network took a hit after the iPhone/android adoption.

I don't get spotty signal and slow service, and I know many others who don't either, on non Spark devices. Try Spark and tell me if the network is slow.

They'll keep on bleeding until they either
1. Merge with Sprint
2. Change their strategy
The second option is unlikely since Legere spoke out this other day, how TMo wants to keep on adding more subscribers.

The cost of adding the customers, especially compounded by paying their ETF, will have to be amortized in more than a quarter. As a amtter of fact, this bias is particularly American, for in Europe results are reported semiannually and in other countries, annually. Then again, looking beyond a quarter is the right way of doing business sustainably.

hesse is smoking something. The guy has made sprint even worse than what it was. He is so worried about gaining tmo customers yet he has not seemed to concerned about the piss poor service he has provided for his current ones. I worked for sprint and it seemed like most of their business decisions were really bad ones. There will be no way softbank will be allowed to purchase tmo. hesse knows his time would be up for certain if there was a buyout that is the only reason he is even saying what he is. He just wants to put on a macho face because he knows his ego has taken a huge hit. Loosing millions of unhappy customers will make someone with power act like that.

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